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Chapter 13: Ecstasy Is Knowing That Nobody Is Holding Your Hand

It has been there always, but it is a very still small voice, because it was suppressed when you were a very small child and the voice was very small - just a sprout, and it was covered with all kinds of crap. And now you go on carrying that crap and you have forgotten the plant that is your life, which is still alive, waiting for you to discover it.

Discover your voice! Then follow it with no fear.

Wherever it leads, there is the goal of your life; there is your destiny. It is only there that you will find fulfillment, contentment. It is only there that you will blossom - and in that blossoming, knowing happens.

How can you know yourself? - you have not even grown. Perhaps you are still in the seed, perhaps even the sprout was not allowed. Every religion takes care: take the child to baptism immediately, take the child to circumcision, take the child to some Hindu ceremony. And the child knows nothing of what you are doing to him.

Just wait - even for having the voting right he will have to wait twenty-one years; just for third-rate politics he will need twenty-one years of life. But, for religion no maturity is needed? Perhaps forty-two may be the right time for a person to decide about religion. But it is not when the child is born and others are deciding.

Yes, you can take him to the voting. You can give him the vote and you can hold his hand to drop the vote in the box, and you can make him choose the president, the prime minister - but the child is completely unaware of what is happening: what is this box about, and what is this card all about?

But you don’t do that. You understand that for politics, at least twenty-one years - at least - are needed for a person to understand. But for religion you don’t give any time at all. There is a reason why you don’t give any time at all. You are afraid, because if you give him time and you don’t mess his mind around before he starts thinking on his own, starts hearing his own voice, then there is no chance for you. You will never be able to make him a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan.

He may become someday religious, but that will be his own search. Someday he may find paths leading to silence, ways of moving to the innermost core of existence, but that will be his own exploration.

And remember one thing: whatsoever you find on your own gives ecstasy. Even if God is given to you ready-made, you will not find any ecstasy in it.

And just running on the seashore finding seashells of no value, you can see a child is ecstatic.

I used to come from the river when I was very small. All my pockets. I used to have many pockets, I insisted on having many pockets. My father said, “It looks crazy. People ask me. You are continually a trouble and for no reason at all. Why should you have four pockets in front and two pockets by the side?”